Legend Of The Guardians and The Paint Box...

It was a pretty miserable day the other day so we decided a snuggle on the sofa and a film was in order. Ebi-kun decided he wanted to watch Legend Of The Guardians again, cute film but quite violent!

After the film he got out his paints and was inspired to do some owly paintings...

He started off with the acrylics and painted a barn owl...

Then he got the water colours out and painted Hedwig from Harry Potter (we are currently on book 4!). Whilst he was painting he was talking a lot about the difference in the paints and how they react differently. It's interesting listening to him make these observations.

And whilst he was chattering away, I was painting my own owl, in between making dinner and downloading and uploading files for the Montessori Crash Course! Bit of a freaky looking owl really..

A little thank you gift...

Di's mom gave Ebi-kun some 'spends' which he used to get this cool water colour painting set, brushes and paper from The Tate Modern. He decided to make a little thank your gift and experimented with his new materials.

First he did a wash and let the paint dry. Then he used my copic pen and drew a picture, not really sure what his inspiration was! Then after that he coloured (painted) it in. 

He also had some birthday money so other goodies he treated himself to were a load of Horrible History books, loom bands, souvenirs from the different places we visited - mostly books or notebooks and the such like. He wanted a Harry Potter wand but at 49GBP I had to veto it. I feel that the HP shop at Kings Cross was sooo overpriced. 

He had fun though and plenty of great souvenirs!

Michelangelo Day...

This was a BIG day so I will list all the resources again at the end of the post. We decided to go the whole hog and do Italian the whole day, this included speaking Italian, although neither of us can speak Italian so it just meant peppering sentences with any random Italian words and talking in an bad Italian accent - amusing if not educational!

We started the day with a traditional Italian breakfast, this is what I ate with the kids I taught when I lived there, milk with biscuits dropped in it, then you scoop the biscuits out with a spoon - took me straight back to Pescara, I don't think I have eaten this since I left. Ebi-kun thought it was a great breakfast and that we should eat it more often.

Next up, we made tiramisu for later in the day (not exactly sounding like the healthiest of days so far...)

So, we left that in the fridge and moved on to more important matters...

Fresco painting! We mixed up some plaster of Paris and poured it into some clean food trays, Ebi-kun played with one of the neighbours whilst we waited for it to dry, since we didn't want it to dry out completely.

He used watercolours to paint with and said he quite liked it but you have to work quickly because the plaster starts to dry.

We did try and put hooks in the back but it didn't work, so we decided to use this just as experimental art.

We had a break for lunch, which was some left over spinach roulade, parma ham and mozzarella & tomato. Then we read Michelangelo by Mike Venezia, we have quite a few of the books from this series now. I like how they are not overly simplified and have enough meat in them to get the child interested but they also don't get too bogged down with details so the child gets bored.

Available from Amazon or The Book Depository

We also watched this a series about Michelangelo from the BBC on YouTube.

And this shorter Horrible Histories one...

As we worked we also listened to this Renaissance music. Next was to paint the Sistine Chapel or at least the underside of the table....
If you do this, then use a splash mat - it did get very messy and I am glad I got Ebi-kun to do it without his t-shirt, it is a good job kids come washable.

Here is the finished master piece, still taped to the underside of the table....

Whilst Ebi-kun was painting, I discovered this great site where you can see the whole of the Sistine Chapel, virtually, very cool and a must do, if you are studying  the same thing. We finished off the day with homemade calzone and a nice glass of Italian white (I did that is, not the boy!)

Resources:

Virtual tour of Sistine Chapel

Discovering Great Artists (the art ideas came from this book)

Michelangelo by Mike Venezia

BBC documentary on youtube

How a change of medium can encourage creativity

We do painting quite often but I admit we tend to stick to acrylic but the other day we got out the water colours. We started off by practising some different techniques such as blending the colours as we painted in circles.

We also tried sprinkling salt of the wet paint to see what would happen

Then Ebi-kun decided he wanted to paint an actual picture, he is really proud of this one. He says..

The blue is the mountains and the red is the sunset sky and the white at the top of the mountains are the clouds hanging around (like the ones we saw in Nagano Mommy) then I used salt on the red to get a nice cloud effect.

Changing the medium also seemed to change the subject for the painting so if your kids or yourself even seems to be stuck in a rut, try swapping what you work with for something new and see what happens.

magic colour mixing

Magic Colour Mixing 

We have done this a couple of times but used a brush to mix the colours and well, it wasn't very successful. This time I found some pipits so we could drop the coloured paint into glass jars with water and it worked much better. So much that BabyEbi declared that it was magic, which of course, it is!

You will need:

3 glass jars
tray to work on
jug for pouring water
red, blue and yellow water colour paint, diluted with a little water
pipits for each colour of paint
clean up cloth
and probably paper to do some painting afterwards.

Babyebi set out the three jars and filled them about 1/3 with water.

Then we practised using the pipits for a bit before I bought out the paint. We talked about each colour then I asked him which colour he wanted to add first. "Blue" so he did and then before he added the red I asked him what colour the water would be he said blue so when it turned purple he was amazed.

We continued until he had mixed purple, orange and green and then he wanted to do it all again. The third time we did it I drew some squares on a postcard for him to fill in, like a maths equation so he painted in the boxes red + yellow = green.

When we talked to my mom on the computer later in the day he could show her what he had been doing and was explaining how the colours mixed together made a new magic colour.




Of course afterwards we had to do some painting using the pipits, lots of fun and lots of mess!

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